the man whom krafft-ebing selected as the typical masochist, leopold von sacher-masoch, was born in lemberg, january 27, 1836.
he was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. he compensated for his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. at twenty he was appointed instructor in german history at an university. at the age of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. he then turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely psychological type.
a morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements.
he showed a decided preference for delineating[pg 201] cruel, mannish types of women and incredibly weak types of men.
as in the case of marquis de sade, we observe here a strange parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography.
sacher-masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, anna von kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised him in every possible way, finally running away with a russian adventurer.
then he met princess bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his professional and literary ambitions. she took him to italy where he was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. he enjoyed the relationship, but the princess soon tired of him.
his next liaison was with baroness fanny pistor, with whom he had his picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor.
then came baroness reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual.
then he became engaged to a young artist, miss bauerfeld, of graz.
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soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, vanda dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him to break his engagement. a child was born of their union and in 1873 they were married. they traveled from town to town, apparently unable to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a reporter from the paris figaro.
sacher-masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly type of woman, hulda meister, retired with her to the small village of lindheim and died there on march 9, 1895.
a few incidents of his life describe well his perversion.
love of the whip. once, according to havelock ellis, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part, sacher-masoch asked his wife to whip him. she refused. then he suggested the maid should do it.
his wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip him to his full enjoyment. when his wife urged that it would not be possible to keep the maid after this, sacher-masoch agreed and she was discharged.
he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife[pg 203] in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share.
this led to much domestic unhappiness. against her wish he persuaded her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. this he claimed was a literary stimulus.
dr. eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom sacher-masoch corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy would be to be whipped by a woman." later on, sacher-masoch met her in vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. she however, pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him.
his numerous books of fiction present over and over again the same theme: the domineering woman, "clad in furs," who tortures a weak helpless man.
we behold in sacher-masoch a clear case of physical weakness and glandular insufficiency. his endocrines, in particular his adrenals and gonads, required the actual stimulation of pain (whipping) before they could react properly to a sexual stimulus.
it is a curious coincidence that among all forms[pg 204] of stimulation used to accelerate the gait of beasts of burden or draft horses, the whip is the most commonly used the world over and that, on the other hand, perverts of the masochist type have, the world over and at every age of history, more frequently resorted to the whip to torture themselves than to any other means of physical punishment.
the masochist is like a weak or tired horse. why does whipping make a horse go faster? not merely on account of the fear or pain which the beast experiences, but because that fear and pain make him stronger.
the adrenalin liberated by the fear-and-pain-producting stimulus stiffens every muscle in his body and his strength is doubled.
this is why frightened animals or insane people in a panic can perform feats of strength of which they would be absolutely incapable in a normal state.
masochism is much more, however, than an organic attempt at compensating for glandular inferiority and acquiring in a morbid way increased sexual potency. it is a neurotic expedient whereby an inferior man or woman compensates for his or her weakness thru more weakness.
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by belittling themselves, by disparaging their own ability, masochist lovers can take advantage of their mate, let him bear all responsibilities.
shoe fetishism. we understand from that point of view the meaning of the shoe fetishism which krafft-ebing has noticed in male masochists. in fact hirschfeld states that every male shoe fetish is a masochist.
to the masochist, the shoe, especially the high buttoned shoe, is symbolical of woman's power, of her ruthless cruelty. he sees himself trod on by that shoe, he imagines that shoe pressing on his neck, pinning his head to the ground.
curiously enough, long gloves seem to arouse the same ideas in the mind of the male masochist. both shoes and gloves are found in the dreams or visions of neurotics, symbolizing the female organs.
a masochist wrote once: "the gloved hand of a woman, altho like her foot, smaller and prettier than a man's, can wield the whip powerfully over her slave whose greatest joy consists then in kissing his mistress's shoes while submitting to that punishment."
craving for humiliation. the masochist welcomes every form of humiliation and not infre[pg 206]quently derives great pride from his "patience," "tolerance," "self-sacrifice," "martyrlike resignation" etc.
like sacher-masoch himself, some men, husbands or lovers, (pimps, cadets, etc.) have been known to enjoy the sight of their wife or mistress in another man's arms.
hirschfeld was consulted by a woman whose husband compelled her at frequent intervals to have relations with a man in his own house. he would invite a business associate for dinner and then leave his wife to explain that he had been suddenly called out of town.
the guest and his wife would dine together. wine would flow freely and she would coquettishly goad the man into making advances to her. concealed in the next room, the husband would watch thru a peep hole the proceedings which ended with a passionate scene.
it was only after beholding that humiliating sight that the masochistic husband could enjoy his wife's embraces.
a man who consulted me confessed to me that he was absolutely impotent with his own wife or with any unmarried woman. it was only with married women that he felt perfectly virile. the thought of[pg 207] his mistress in her husband's arms was the only thing that could arouse him physically.
many neurotics of the masochistic type have dreams of being school children punished by a masculine female teacher. those dreams, be they night or day dreams, are always associated with erotic thoughts. remember jean jacques rousseau enjoying viciously the spankings which mademoiselle lambercier gave him when a child.
masochists, male or female, are often very anxious to perform menial or disgusting tasks for the person they love, thus placing themselves in a subordinate, protected, position and at the same time, claiming a great deal of credit for their devotion.
masochistic fancies. the male masochist, eager to place himself in the position of safety toward his mate, not infrequently imagines himself to be an animal and asks to be treated as such. greek antiquity has bequeathed to us the story of aristotle the philosopher, allowing a prostitute to ride on his back, whipping him like a horse, while he would crawl about on all fours.
medical literature contains many descriptions of establishments where male masochists are submitted to voluntary torture thru various appliances.
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the ascetics who in the middle ages whipped themselves, wore hair cloth studded with sharp nails, etc., to manifest their love to god or the virgin, the russian skooptsy who mutilate themselves to please god, are religious examplaries of masochistic love.
the christian ideal of suffering and renunciation as a means of conquering everlasting happiness is also purely masochistic.
suffering, be it physical or mental (remorse), assures to them in the end, well-being (glandular well-being) and enables them to reach heaven (will-to-be-above).
are women masochistic? i denied in the preceding chapter the frequently heard assertion that sadism in a typically masculine trait. i would deny quite as emphatically that masochism is peculiarly feminine, a view held by many sadists, as an attempted justification of their cruel perversion.
oscar wilde, a bisexual, stated once that of all the masculine traits it was cruelty which women appreciated most. to his morbid mind cruelty meant power. it is power of course which woman, disabled several times in her life by pregnancy and lactation, seeks in the man with whom she mates. he must be a good fighter and a good hunter, not,[pg 209] however, merely to capture her and brutalise her, but on the contrary, to protect her and feed her.
the sadist kurnberger in his novel, "the castle of horrors" also bids us believe that man's greatest victory, appreciated as such by woman, consists in making a woman suffer, in bringing tears to her eyes, in outtalking and outwitting her, "a victory compared to which," he says, "marengo and austerlitz look like thirty cents."
and the sadistic nietzsche puts in the mouth of an old woman in his "zarathustra" the following statement: "when you go to women, don't forget to take your whip."
other sadists remind us of the russian woman's wail that her husband's love must be cooling off, because he hasn't beaten her in an age. barring a number of exceptions, the fact remains that masochism in women is as abnormal as masochism in men, or sadism in men or women.
women who enjoy a beating. there are women who enjoy unconsciously being beaten by their husbands, much as they may resent the outrage consciously.
they are in every case hypothyroid and hypoad[pg 210]renal types in whom the distribution of energy and the emergency production of energy are very subnormal. nothing but a violent stimulus, physical or mental, whipping or insult, can make them feel strong and active.
the dreams of those women, like those of masochistic men, are often of the nightmarish type. they suffer in their night visions all sorts of torture. analysis brings out the fact that every detail of those dreams is associated with energy, achievement, etc.
de sade's wife belonged evidently to the masochistic type. she remained faithful to him to the end in spite of his perverse life, his prison record and the fact that he deceived her with her own sister. her life of sorrow must have vouchsafed her, after all, a good many masochistic compensations of the neurotic variety.
famous women sadists. as against the assumption that "all" women are masochists, we may mention many famous women sadists, several byzantine and roman empresses, frankish queens, two russian empresses, the treatment meted out by women to theroigne de méricourt, tortured publicly by the jacobine women in 1793, not to mention legendary characters like the amazons and mytholo[pg 211]gical goddesses who killed or tortured their lovers.
sadism and masochism in love are pathological disturbances due to a neurotic attempt on the part of an inferior individual to dominate the sexual partner thru violence or weakness, and to assure himself against defeat in the sexual relationship.
the freudian suggestion that the sadist identifies himself with the powerful and apparently, brutal father, the masochist identifying himself with the weaker and submissive mother, applies to a too restricted number of cases to be of positive help in understanding the nature of those two perversions. even when that explanation seems to fit the case, we must, nevertheless, fall back upon the adlerian view of the neurotic temperament in order to understand why a child decides to identify himself with one parent instead of the other.
